Starpath Online Course General Instructions that Apply to all Courses |
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General procedure for working through the course... | |||||||
Read the lesson assignments from the first topic of each lesson. This will have a lesson title in all capital letters (i.e., 1.1 — INTRODUCTION or 3.1 — GLOBAL WINDS). Then do the reading from the texts and software as called for on each lesson. All of the online materials can be printed for reading offline. There might also be practice exercises to carry out. If at any point in your study you have a question about what was assigned or what you have read, then you can either search the Student Discussion group for your answer, or post your own question in the Discussion Group. At the end of the lesson there is at least one practice quiz that you can use to confirm that the recommended materials are understood. The quizzes are discussed below. There are additional links in the classroom to other references and related articles. These extra links are all optional materials to look at. All of the syllabus and quizzes are based on our own textbooks and workbooks. See samples of pages from inside the course including more notes on procedures. One efficient way to organize your study is to print out the Practice Quiz at the beginning of a lesson, and use it as a study guide marking the items we want to be sure are covered in that lesson. Then as you read through the assignments you will spot the answers we are focusing on and can mark them on the print out. When you have all of the questions answered, you are ready to return to the quiz online, post your answers, print or save a copy for your records, and submit it to be graded by the instructor. When checking your numerical work from computations or plotting or reading charts and maps with the provided solutions, keep in mind these notes on Getting the Right Answer. Log out when you are finished If you cannot log in or are told you are already logged in but cannot get in, then use starpath.com/logout link to make a clean logout so you can start again. Ask questions as needed Check the Student Discussion Forum frequently and skim through all new posts Remember the ebooks Lesson Terminology (Glossary) Videos and Articles |
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Practice quizzes... | |||||||
Each lesson includes at least one practice quiz at the end. There are multiple choice as well as numerical solutions, and some that ask for a short written explanation. The purpose of the quizzes are to double check that the key features of the lesson have been mastered. The quizzes, however, are part of the training. These are not like tests in school! If a question is not clear to you, or you are not confident about your solution, you can post a question about the question before you submit the quiz. Our goal is that the subject matter be understood on a practical level that will ultimately help with your decision making and more discussion always helps with that. Likewise when you get your graded quiz back and then have access to the solutions we provide, you are encouraged to ask about them as needed. One hint to all quizzes is the multiple choice questions are almost always directly tied to terminology, and the answers to these will be found in the Glossary. In short, there is generally one such multiple choice for each of the assigned new terms for that lesson. Since the quizzes are part of the training, they are sometimes not simply asking for rote repeat of some stated fact, but involve thinking about the question or how it might relate to other things that have been treated specifically. On the other hand, if any of these seem to wander too far off the content as directly presented, just post a question for more discussion of what is intended by the question. In some multiple choice, we might benefit from ruling out the answers that are definitely not right, and then choosing from the better or more general of what is left. This is very good training for USCG exams, in particular those that deal with the Nav Rules. More generally, though, the very process of ruling out some answers reflects understanding of the topics at hand. The weight of each question in the over all score is listed next to the question number. In some quizzes they are all the same; in others they can differ quite a bit for those that take longer to solve. Also note that some questions have no weight, and the answer or input to those will not affect the score... even if we forget to mark them right! Here is a summary of tips on working quizzes www.starpath.com/quizhelp See important note below on Printing Quizzes after you type in your answers before pushing the submit button. Quiz solutions Please read all quiz solutions |
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Printing Options... | |||||||
Print the Practice Quizzes When the quiz is filled out, you are ready to go back to the online quiz, transcribe your answers to the online form. Once they are all typed in, please make another copy of the quiz as discussed below, and then submit them to be graded. Once graded, you will get an email from the instructor with notes on the quiz, after which you can look at the full solutions at the My Accounts link (must be logged in to see them). Please... print or save your entered solutions before submitting A practical option to paper printing before submitting is to save what you have typed in as a pdf file on your computer. Most computers these days have a print to pdf option (video of the process). Call us if you need help with this. An alternative when working away from your own computer is to use the print button (top of the tan panel on the left), then copy that content and paste it into an email to yourself. This will provide a record of what you submitted. We are always extremely sad when a student says I am sure I marked the correct answer, but the score says I missed the question. You have the power to insure that this never happens, and it takes just seconds! Print a degree sign ( ° ) |
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Student Discussion Forums... | |||||||
The Starpath online courses include over 19 years of archived student discussions. These are grouped according to the course topic, but students do have access to more than what is just in their course. The main resource in each course is called the Student Discussion Forum. This archive is a key resource to your training as it is effectively equivalent to having attended hundreds of courses on the same topic as you can search the discussion from all of them. Ask for help by posting a question Newest replies to a topic at the end When you post a question Use a separate post for separate topics or subjects How to post a picture or graphic in the student discussion One easy way to make the picture is just take a cell phone pic of the plot or drawing and then mail it to yourself, choosing a size less than 300k. Many phones tell you the size before sending. The smallest will usually do fine, i.e. on an iPhone a typical email might offer these options: small 40 kb, medium 107 kb, large 546 kb, or actual 2.1 MB. New phones often offer the option to crop pictures even before this stage, which helps limit the size. Then check your mail in your computer, and save the image to a place you can find, then when posting the pic just navigate to that location and select it. If you get a notice that the picture you are trying to post is too big or too wide, you can adjust the picture size with MS Paint in a PC or with Preview in a Mac.... or other graphics programs. These are the ones included in the two operating systems, so everyone has them. If anyone has trouble with this, let us know, and we will post a video on the process. We also have other options for sending instructors a cellphone pic of your work, for example. This is covered in the courses. A screen capture is often in the PNG format. Using either of the above apps you can change this to JPG which is usually much smaller. Note: there cannot be any special characters in the file name (letters, numbers, a dash, or underscore only). Time tags for displayed posts How long to wait for an answer When answering or following up on discussion Student answers to posted questions |
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Other Discussion Notes... | |||||||
Please read the discussions Check yellow light bulbs for new posts Public Discussion forums More than one page of topics Practice with USCG Exam Questions |
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Search Options... | |||||||
Search option Summary of Search Options
If you do not find your answer with the above searches, then just post a new topic and an instructor will help you. |
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eCharts and GRIB files... | |||||||
Inland and Coastal Navigation Course Use of the program is optional but recommended. A link to the program download as well as the18565tr training chart download is at the course support page www.starpath.com/navbook. Note that the training chart version we use 18465tr is different in several key details from the NOAA chart 18465. We have videos on how to download and install program and chart in the Course Video Index Electronic Chart Navigation Course Marine Weather Course |
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Course Completion... | |||||||
Certification of Course Completion Course Time Extension Your course registration does not time out, but you must have an active webcard to access the online course and other Starpath Resources and discussion forums. The course registration includes a webcard that lasts for one year. If for any reason you wish to have access to the course and other resources beyond that period, you can purchase a webcard extension then register the extension at the bottom of the page, using your same username and password. |
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